Absolutely fabulous: Joanna’s a jolly good fellow
Corporation dominates television Bafta awards as US streaming giant’s royal drama misses out
WHEN Netflix outbid the BBC for rights to produce The Crown, it was meant to represent the US streaming giant’s triumphant entry into the world of British drama.
But the BBC had the last laugh yesterday when its gritty police procedural Happy Valley, made on a fraction of The Crown’s £100 million budget, trounced it at the Baftas.
Happy Valley was named best drama series, the night’s most coveted award. Sarah Lancashire, who plays the no-nonsense police constable at the heart of the series, beat The Crown’s Claire Foy to the leading actress prize.
The Crown ledd the shortlist with five nominations but t in the end won nothing. However, ver, Lancashire declared herself fa a fan of The Crown, saying in n her acceptance speech: “Claire Foy, you have given me the best 10 hours under a duvet that I’ve ever had.”
Netflix has planned seven series of The Crown, charting g the Queen’s reign. gn. The cost put it beyond nd the reach of the BBC, C, but the corporation’s head ead of drama, Piers Wenger, enger, told The Daily
Telegraph: “I think ink it was right for the BBC not to do it. I think if we had spent £100 million… then we would have had to have lost so many Line of Dutys and Happy Valleys and I think those pieces of work truly pushed the boundaries.”
The Crown had two nominees in the supporting actor category – John Lithgow and Jared Harris – but the award went to Tom Hollander for The Night Manager, another BBC drama. Vanessa Kirby, who played Princess Margaret in The Crown, also lost out to Wunmi Mosaku ( Damilola, Our Loved Boy) as best supporting actress. The Must-see Moment – the only award chosen by viewers – went to the scene from Planet Earth II in which an iguana is chased by hordes of snakes. Winners were instructed to include “a short anecdote or an interesting detail” in their speech – seen by some as an attempt to avoid a repeat of last year, when several winners made overtly political speeches criticising government interference in the BBC. There was nothing party political about this year’s speeches. Instead, the winners used their time to refer to the issues raised by their films, from Hillsborough to the refugee crisis.
BBC One’s film about the death of Damilola Taylor, Damilola, Our Loved Boy, was named best single drama. Many in the audience were in tears as his father, Richard Taylor, took the stage and made a plea for young people to end the epidemic of knife crime. Adeel Akhtar won best actor for Murdered By My Father, a BBC Three drama. The awards were hosted by Sue Perkins, the former Great British Bake Off presenter. She described Bake Off’s move to Channel 4 as “painful” and made several jokey references to the shift, including: “Let’s crack on before someone sells the format to Channel 4.”
Joanna Lumley was honoured with the Bafta Fellowship, awarded for outstanding contribution to television. The academy said she had become a “true icon” of the small screen thanks to roles in shows from The New Avengers to Absolutely Fabulous.
Lumley received a standing ovation as she collected her award. She said: “I’m like a piece of cellophane laid over the industry.
“We are lit and furnished with words and costumed and made up, we have stunt performers to make us look better, we have people who feed us and dress us and we arrive and people say ‘you were so funny in that’ and you say ‘yes, thanks’. It’s all somebody else.”